Milan

The Italian pilot is settled in the city of Milan, the second largest city in Italy of about 1 million of inhabitants, located in the North of Italy. Milan is the financial and economical capital of the country. It was also the first Italian metropolis which first implemented a city-wide Participatory Budgeting, in 2015. On May 2017 the EMPATIA project launched the “Monitoring Cycle” of Milan previous PB. EMPATIA provided the platform with tools to enable the tracking of implementation of projects, and the transparency of data. On a later stage, the OpenDCN platform, developed by UNIMI, was introduced to support EMPATIA project on the Milan new “Deliberation Cycle”. The PB process will end in March 2018. It followed the methodology that has been implemented in many small and medium cities in Lombardy Region and beyond, and which has been recently adopted also in the Municipality of Madrid. This model was never tested in large cities in Italy.

Monitoring Cycle Platform

The Monitoring Cycle that was fully implemented with the EMPATIA platform. It consisted of an ad hoc configuration of the platform where the winning projects of the previous PB (2015) are described and the phases of its implementation can be monitored by citizens. The description of each project is the same description that appeared in the voting phase of the previous PB edition (i.e. title, short description, details, required budget). Information presented there also made available the number of votes that each project has collected, and the list of the interventions, or “sub-projects”, which compose the project.

The infographic was one of the key features of the tool, because it provided to the citizens with the exact information of the state-of-the-art of the implementation, and to what pace and extent the administration is fulfilling its plans.